Blood Ties Book One: The Turning. Jennifer Armintrout

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СКАЧАТЬ sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his- or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult.

      It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life.

      Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers.

      There was no time like the present.

      “How old are you?” I asked.

      “Thirty-two.”

      “I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest.

      “Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.”

      I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napoléon and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.”

      “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face.

      “It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.”

      I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection.

      “It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.”

      How anyone could be blasé about his entire head morphing into a Harry Hausen-esque special effect was beyond me.

      “The scary part is that it gets worse with age. Some of the real old vampires even get horns when they change, or cloven feet. But you can control it, with practice. You just have to calm yourself, find your center, all that New Age crap. It’s very Zen.” He took the empty cup from my hands and headed to the kitchen sink.

      New Age crap? This from the guy running the witchcraft minimart?

      “Now, how about telling me what happened tonight?” he called over the sound of running water.

      I shuddered. “Can’t we start with what the weather’s been like?”

      “No.”

      “It was nothing, really,” I said, trying to sound casual.

      “‘Nothing’ rarely stabs people.” He came in and sat next to me on the sofa. The scent of him teased my nostrils, and I rather seriously debated whether or not to lean against him and inhale deeply.

       I really need to get out more.

      “I needed blood.”

      Nathan frowned. “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”

      “Okay, even if I had, did I look like I won that particular fight?”

      He looked relieved that he wouldn’t have to chop off my head.

      “I followed a girl into a club downtown. One of those…Goth clubs.” I lowered my voice, as if Goth were a dirty word.

      “Club Cite?” he asked, and I nodded. “That was very dangerous. Clubs like that are full of all kinds of undesirables. People who think they’re vampires, wannabe vampires and vampire hunters. Amateurish vampire hunters, but with enough knowledge to kill you, even if it is just a lucky accident.”

      “I know that now,” I said bitterly, remembering the metallic taste of Dahlia’s blood on my tongue. I took a deep breath. “I met a girl there. She told me she’d let me—” I stumbled over the words. “Drink her blood. I paid her.”

      Nathan sighed and shook his head, reaching for one of the notebooks on the table. “What was her name?”

      “Dahlia.” I looked over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages. There were crudely drawn diagrams and notes in the margins. A paper clip held a Polaroid in place at the top of one page. He handed the photo to me.

      “Is this her?”

      I looked at the photo. The woman did look like Dahlia, but a black Betty Page wig covered her red curls. The eyes were the same. Hard and crazy. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed that before. I told him it was her and returned the picture.

      He stood, cursed and threw it down on the table. I shrank away, surprised at his sudden vehemence.

      “I told you to come here if you needed blood! Why didn’t you come to me?” he shouted.

      “I did! You weren’t home!”

      “You should have waited!” He glared at me and braced himself for my next retort.

      Raising my voice had calmed me considerably. When I didn’t respond, he swore and turned away, running a hand through his hair.

      “Are you finished?” I asked.

      He sighed angrily. “Yes, dammit. But you should have waited.”

      “Maybe I should have. But I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.” I scooped up the picture. “Do you know her?”

      “Who?”

      I rolled my eyes and held up the photo. “Dahlia.”

      When he sat beside me, he seemed to take up more of the couch than before. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was intentionally trying to be close to him, so I moved to the armchair.

      “I know of her,” he said, examining the notebook. “She’s a very powerful witch.”

      “A witch?” I laughed.

      Nathan stared at me in annoyance before turning his attention back to the notebook. He laced his fingers together and brought them to his mouth, and his eyes glazed in deep concentration. Watching him, I realized why I’d been so disappointed to hear he wasn’t centuries old. Everything about him seemed anachronistic, as though he’d stepped from the Middle Ages into the present. He would look less out of place standing on a blood-drenched battlefield than sitting on a secondhand couch in an apartment full of musty old books. I imagined him charging into battle, face grim with purpose, his strong arms wielding a sword with both hands, his muscular thighs—

      “See something you like?” His voice jolted me from my lusty historical imaginings. I was caught.

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